How to Build a Successful Tactical Mine Plan
Article #1: The Challenges
Mining companies today depend on two separate but inter-connected mine plans: a strategic mine plan, which is a long-term plan covering the entire life of mine, and a more detailed tactical mine plan that turns the decisions outlined in the strategic plan into a schedule that will govern the mine’s day-to-day operations.
Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Just set some targets and put them into a calendar and you’re good for years to come. Not so much, I’m afraid.
This series of posts takes a look at how mining companies can improve their ability to develop a sound and successful tactical plan, beginning with a discussion of some of the key challenges facing planning engineers.
Scheduling is complicated
Scheduling mine operations requires hundreds if not thousands of inputs, and if one input changes, a tiny decrease in tonnage, for example, it will have a cascading effect on some if not all of the others.
One of the first challenges an engineer must face when developing a tactical mine plan is how to collect, collate, and update all pertinent data — including topography, pit design, scheduling parameters such as production rates, capacities, calendars, targets, etc.?— in a manageable way.
Correct communication is essential
The ultimate goal of a tactical mine schedule is to answer the question, “Which blocks do I mine, and when?”
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But the format in which that answer must be supplied to the different stakeholders will vary. Some teams, for example, such as the team monitoring costs and revenues, will require the schedule in spreadsheets, while the team accountable for grades will need graphs, and operators will require graphical plots.
That means a second big challenge for a planning engineer is making sure they are able, first, to translate the schedule easily and accurately into a variety of formats, and second, to communicate it in the most appropriate format for each audience.
Understanding can be hard
A third challenge for planning engineers is being able to define extremely complex material movement systems that exactly replicate their real operations.
It can be difficult for planning engineers to fully understand the relationships between inputs and outputs at a mining operation. They might intuitively understand the downstream effects of, for example, increasing the production rate, but the nature of mining operations is often so complex that, without a comprehensive model, it’s difficult to really know what effect tweaking that rate may have.
A planning engineer, therefore, needs to be able to, in essence, play with the inputs, exploring how each one affects the end results from pit to port, in order to come up with the optimum schedule.??
Next in this series
The four articles that follow in this series illustrate how to deal with these challenges and build an effective, successful tactical mine plan by:
I hope you will join me in this conversation. Let me know if there is anything else related to tactical mine planning that you’d like to learn about and I will make sure to cover it in this series.